MySQL Miscellanae

I've often suspected that I'm not a SQL guru... little things like being
self taught and having virtually no resources for learning it. This has been
confirmed to a large degree at work, where our DBA has taught me many tricks
about databases: indexing, when to use DISTINCT, how and when to do JOINs,
and the magic of TEMPORARY TABLEs. I now feel fairly competent, though far
from being an expert -- I certainly don't know much about how to tune a
server for MySQL, or tuning MySQL for performance.

Last year around this time, we needed to replace our MySQL server, and I
got handed the job of getting the data from the old one onto the new. At the
time, I looked into replication, and from there discovered about binary
copies of a data store. I started using this as a way to backup data,
instead of periodic mysqldumps.

One thing I've often wondered since: would replication be a good way to do
backups? It seems like it would, but I haven't investigated.
One post on the aforementioned Slashdot article addressed this, with the
following summary:

Set up replication

Do a locked table backup on the slave

Concise and to the point. I only wish I had a spare server on which to
implement it!